I'm +1 to going to CTR, removing the blocking rule for PRs, or both.

Gary

On Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 13:43 Matt Sicker <[email protected]> wrote:

> When we decided to try out RTC, I had accepted the idea with the caveat
> that I’d only be alright with it if there is prompt PR review. Some of my
> PRs since then have indeed been reviewed or approved within a day or two
> (good), but some of them have sat for months without a single comment.
> Seeing as how we’ve disabled committing to main and 2.x directly, I can’t
> merge my own PR. I’m bringing this issue up once again to see if we can
> resolve it.
>
> This makes it much harder to make simple code changes such as typo fixes,
> documentation updates, small refactoring, and similar chore work simply too
> complicated with unnecessary procedures. There are some other reasons why
> this RTC flow doesn’t seem to match this PMC:
>
> * RTC tends to be used in highly active codebases with dozens or hundreds
> of regular contributors.
> * RTC works best when reviewers have sufficient time available every week
> (estimate; thinking of the 72-hour style feedback window at ASF).
> * RTC can technically be accomplished by having a coworker review the code
> before making a PR (assuming both are on the same PMC), which gives undue
> advantage to full-time contributors compared to part-time contributors.
> * RTC seems to think that the ideal time to go over architectural design
> and other planning details is at the time of proposing the code change;
> ideally, non-trivial changes will document and discuss the proposed feature
> via mail and issue tracking.
> * RTC is a flow optimized for accepting contributions from third parties;
> being invited to be a committer is supposed to trust that person with the
> responsibility to know what they feel comfortable committing directly
> versus what may benefit from peer review ahead of merging.
>
> If you wonder how it is or was possible to manage this project using CTR,
> I point to the past when it was CTR. Before we enabled Dependabot, I used
> to be able to follow the commits@ mailing list where I could
> asynchronously review code as it was added to a main branch. Replying to
> those emails would default to dev@, so the conversation went somewhere
> meaningful. When we used CTR, I would oftentimes post to dev@ with
> details about what I was planning to implement or change. We had also
> configured CI to post an email about test failures in the main branch(es)
> so that if they were broken, we were alerted to the need to fix it right
> away (which was even more useful in the past when our build/test time was
> much longer than it is now).

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